Archive for the ‘Innovative Business Practices’ Category
Daydreaming finally pays off
Monday, June 8th, 2009One of my favorite marketing blogs, Neuromarketing, recently ran a post about the positive side of daydreaming.
As blogger Roger Dooley notes, when business teams need to brainstorm a new idea, the knee-jerk action is to get people sitting down together to spend a segmented amount of time concentrating on thinking and talking about one topic until something sticks.
Don't think so hard. According to psychologist sources, daydreaming can be productive.
However according to Karina Christoff, psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, this tried and true method is not always the best approach.
It’s not that concentrated thought is a bad idea. But daydreaming, Professor Christoff suggests, isn’t as unproductive as it is said to be. In fact, daydreaming improves your creativity.
Christoff explains: After all that mind-wandering, eventually you start seeing connections that you wouldn’t have seen before, because you would never have logically allowed your mind to make those connections. Now it’s going to make them for you.”
I’m sure that most marketing experts have their own unique take on the creative brainstorming process. Few people can come up with something truly innovative by staying within the lines.
So what’s your approach?
Image source:Â http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4567659/Americans-embarrassed-by-poor-spelling-performance-compared-to-Britons.html
The IE6 Rant!!!
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
It’s no big secret that large organizations are slow to change. Especially with their technology. But I am constantly amazed by the number of people who are still being forced to use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) by their work environments. IE6 was initially released in 2001. That’s 8 year ago! Stop reading for a second and look around the room your in. What technology do you see from 8 years ago? When are large organizations going to realize that it’s time to upgrade?
Big reason #1 for not upgrading: “Upgrading may break our current apps.â€
IE6 behaves differently than every other browser, so it requires more development time. It is a last generation browser which doesn’t support many newer features. It is half the speed of most modern browsers (on a good day). This limits new applications, not to mention the price increases that accompany longer development processes. Google has been actively pushing people away from IE6. When you log into Gmail with IE6 you get a “Get faster Gmail” message which encourages you to switch to Chrome or FireFox. Even 37Signals has dropped support with an explanation of IE6’s limitations at http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html. It is much easier to upgrade an app to a modern browser, than develop modern apps to run in IE6. While these organizations may need to spend money on upgrading older applications, they will save money in the long run because all their new projects will be quicker and easier to develop.
Big reason #2 for not upgrading: “We don’t know the security and compatibility implications of upgrading.â€
Even Microsoft has decided it is time to move on. They have announced that they will stop actively supporting IE6 in June. It will be grandfathered in, but will receive no more compatibility and security updates. If this isn’t an indication that it is time to move on I don’t know what is. In 2009, Secunia, a computer security company, reported 142 vulnerabilities compared to the 34 in Firefox (http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11/). I wonder how long it will take for IT departments to catch on that upgrading will be cheaper and easier than trying to support software that even the company that wrote it won’t support.
If anybody else has complaints about IE6, let’s hear it.
Tell, Don’t Ask
Friday, February 20th, 2009No, I am not suggesting you turn into a dictator and boss people around.
Warning, ruby specific software developer content ahead.
Back in the old days before my time, computers were programmed with Procedural Languages. Measure 1 cup of pancake mix into a bowl, stir in 1 cup milk, mix. Heat griddle … well, you get the idea. Everything was spelled out in procedural sequence. And programs were long and hard to maintain.
Then along came Smalltalk-80 which introduced the world to Object Oriented programming. Now we can tell the Griddle object to flip the contents. How that happens is entirely up to the griddle. The goal is to split large programs into manageable pieces (objects) that are easier for people to work through.
Tell Don’t Ask refers to a guideline in Object Oriented programming: tell an object to do something, don’t ask it for private data.
Alec Sharp (1) contrasts procedural and object oriented programming in his book Smalltalk by Example by:
Alec Sharp, as quoted in the Pragmatic Bookshelf article “Tell, Don’t Ask”
With procedural languages writing something like this was common:
while scanner.has_links_to_visitlink = scanner.next_link_to_visit
webpage_contents = get(link)
process_webpage(webpage_contents)end
My fingers hurt just typing that in.
Imagine my shock and horror when I realized that example was recently written in my favorite object oriented language: ruby. How could this be? Was I asleep at the keyboard when I typed in the while loop?
How do we know this code is procedural? Simple, it asks the “scanner” is there any work to do and makes a decision based on the answer which violates the “Tell, Don’t Ask” guideline.
We can turn this procedural code into object oriented code by using an iterator. David A. Black covers this topic nicely in his book The Well-Grounded Rubyist. The object oriented version using an iterator turns the while loop into
scanner.each_link_to_visit {|link| process_webpage(get(link)) }
The iterator “each_link_to_visit” quietly hides the details and provides values to the block, one at a time. The big win comes during application maintenance: reading 1 line of clear code is easier to understand than reading 5 lines of code. It’s like reading the Cole’s Notes version of War and Peace versus the reading the original version in Russian.
Iterators are a handy-dandy tool for converting procedural while loops into object oriented loops.
Happy iterating,
Alvin.
Juggling audiences
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009A long time ago, in a galaxy without Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and (gasp) no Google…
I was reading Garfield comics on dead trees (paper books). Yep I was in elementary school and enjoyed a good laugh at the fat cat.
Last weekend I was tired but not sleepy so I decided to Google Garfield. And up popped the Garfield website.
Two things caught my eye
- Garfield is still targeted towards kids
- I can read comics for free without killing trees
So I started reading the comics. Some comics were rehashing old material. Some comics (almost) showed character development as the main character Jon finally found a girlfriend. And I laughed (ROTFL?).
Garfield comic: November 12, 2008
Then the sciency part of me kicked in and I asked myself Am I so immature that I still laugh at the same things I did in elementary school? Or does the Garfield comic work on multiple levels?
Then I looked at the Garfield website again with new eyes. Plenty of cartoon graphics for kids. Some advertising for adults: sign up for Vonage, virtual web hosting, give me your money…
Perhaps some of the comics work on two levels
- facial expression changes and cute graphics for the kids
- words in the captions: rating a girlfriend on how fast she can pluck a chicken for those in the dating scene
Out of curiosity, how many urban kids know what “plucking a chicken” entails?
How can a website for kids be “safe” when it includes advertising from a third-party?
Things that make me go “Hmm…” now that I am not in elementary school.
Image source: http://garfield.com/comics/todayscomic.html on November 12, 2008
Page backwards or search for November 12, 2008.
Marketing Copy Search, Continued: Knowing Your Company’s Values
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Great Web Copy is a Product of Teamwork
In the comment thread from my last post, Justin mentioned 37 Signals as a model for great web copy. I couldn’t agree more. For those of us looking to write smart, sharp marketing copy for the online software market, I think 37 Signals sets a high standard.
Consider this quote from their homepage:
Execution is everything.
We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. We build easy to use web-based products with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features. We’re focused on executing on the basics beautifully.
Source: http://www.37signals.com
Without getting too technical, I’d like to point out the consistent structural features of this snippet. The use of short sentences helps the copy pack a punch: each statement comes and says only what it needs to. Conventional grammar is abandoned in favour of information-stuffed fragments. The tone of the copy matches the mission of the company. Just like they want to simplify online software, 37 Signals accordingly communicates in a simple, no-nonsense fashion. Their software is friendly, so their copy is friendly.
Which brings me to what I believe to be the most important maxim of writing web copy: match your voice with your company. Short and sweet is nothing if your copy doesn’t have something more, its own unique voice. There is nothing that can improve your marketing better than a thorough understanding of your business’s mission and value system that goes for marketing in person, of course, as much as it does on the web.
My suggestion to web writers is to take the time to accustom yourself with the look and feel of your company, and this ranges from its webpage, to its physical office space, to the people who make the magic happen on a daily basis. Have a conversation with your coworkers about what your company means, what its ambitions are and what its core values boil down to. Write that stuff down, and highlight key words that come to mind. Here at Plainpeak, our philosophy always links back to “Grow Smart”. I find those two words surprisingly helpful when I’m struggling with marketing copy.
Justin also drew my attention to an incredible non-profit site called Housing Works. Next week I want to consider the differences and resonances between non-profit and corporate marketing copy: what can each of them learn from the other?
In the meantime, I am interested in more examples of great web copy. What are your favourites?
Image Source: http://www.avision2market.com/index.html
